The Big Read Blog (Archive)

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A native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for nearly three decades, Sister Helen Prejean has dedicated her life to prison ministry, particularly with inmates convicted of capital crimes. Her 1994 book Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States was a New York Times bestseller and has since been made into both a feature film and an opera. In this interview excerpt, Prejean comments on the universality of Ernest J. Gaine's A Lesson Before Dying, which centers on the death row relationship of a local teacher and a young man who may have been unjustly been condemend to die.

This story is about redemption. Double redemption of a black man who was sentenced to death and called a hog at his trial and learned how to die as a man and the teacher who tried to help him and who learned how to walk as a man in his life too. . . .It?s really a story about human freedom and choice up against great extremity and great injustice and working creatively within it. And that?s what really appeals. Also that we see that humanness in everyone: We see the humanness in Grant, we see the humanness in Jefferson, we see the humanness in Ms. Emma and in Aunt Lou and everybody. So that I think is what touches us in the story.